I hate client documents waiting to be edited in my inbox. It’s not that I hate working on them. It’s the opposite. It’s that I hate the idea that they’re right there and I haven’t gotten to them yet. Everyone has something that just has to be done right, right now. Maybe you need to…
I’ve been working with brilliant thinkers this month. Their brilliance doesn’t make them great writers — in fact, it sometimes gets in the way. The brilliant thinker often falls into what you might call the professor mode. After studying a subject in great deal — and often after accumulating massive amounts of experience — they…
I’m affiliated with a ghostwriting agency. The way they work is simple: they send an opportunity to their mailing list every week or two, and anyone on that list can respond. I’ve snagged the opportunity every single time I’ve pitched them, but I recently communicated with a woman who’d failed every single time. Reviewing her…
All this week, I’ve looked for lessons from the hundreds of thousands of words I’ve edited in the last few years. Here’s a little of what I’ve learned. Writing is difficult. But with enough practice and good coaching, you can get good at it. Editing is a higher level of difficulty. The editor must understand…
Which words does your author come back to again and again? As an editor, your eye and ear must detect these repetitions, but that’s not sufficient. You need to understand why the author comes back to them and suggest fixes that improve meaning, rather than just creating variety. In a business book I recently edited, the…
One big job of an editor is to provide a perspective from outside the confines of the writer’s head. Writers burble out all sorts of prose that made sense to them when they wrote it. The editor points out what must change for that prose to make sense to everyone else. Today’s examples come from…
Editors deal in meaning. Metaphors are great for meaning — until they get out of hand. What do you tell an author whose relationship with metaphors has become promiscuous? Today’s example, like yesterday’s, comes from a book I was editing. The author had great ideas and an engaging writing style, but occasionally got carried away….
One of the editor’s primary jobs is to make sentences say what they mean. When the prose gets in the way of the ideas, fix the prose. A focus on the subjects and verbs in sentences can help make prose clearer and reduce the cognitive load on the reader. These examples come from a book…
The New York Times published a piece about helicopter parents making obvious and easily detectable edits to college essays. Once you recognize that your job as an editor is to improve writers, not just writing, you won’t do stuff like that. The writer of the Times piece, titled “How I Know You Wrote Your Kid’s College…